This may have been the most unenjoyable experience of my career. This was the first time in my career that I felt like a paid bully rather than a sales professional.
-
To start, this is an absolute boiler room sweatshop sales organization. The actual hours are 8:30 - 5:30, though you will be expected to come in far before then, and stay long after then. It's normal to see reps in the office at 7am - 7pm, work through their lunch, and still not even sniff their quota.
-
The culture on the floor is miserably corny and fake. You'll listen to yes-men good boy reps say the most ridiculously over-the-top fake optimistic statements in leadership facing meetings, just for them to talk about how much they hate their job when you conversate behind closed doors. Get ready to hear the term "Fired Up!" on an hourly basis.
-
You'll be "Back in my day"'d by your manager on a daily basis and get almost no continuous training other than having someone review a Gong call saying "Well I would have said...". Almost all of leadership was promoted from within from hitting their number as a rep back when the business had bigger territories and less reps. The old saying "Good AEs don't make good leaders", really rings true here.
-
There is a massive account problem here. There are not enough viable accounts that are realistically within our ICP to feed the amount of reps on the floor. Every account you do work will have passed through 4-5 reps before you - all of which know who we are, and are tired of hearing from us. If you'd like to see how our sales team is viewed in the field, you can do your own research (there are several reddit threads about it).
-
You will spend 99% of your time prospecting and get almost nothing of substance from inbound channels. Almost every single weekly, monthly, and quarterly prospecting or closing KPI is unobtainable (yes, if there's a dashboard that can be built around it, you can best believe they will be tracking it, and you can even better believe that your manager will be having constant conversations with you about it).
-
You'll spend your time chasing breadcrumb deals while waiting for something huge to come inbound (which is seldom). If you do manage to close a large deal, you'll be paid a fraction of it with the incentive to be paid the rest contingent on hitting your next 2 Quarters quota (which I can assure you, will not happen).
-
Lastly, employee attrition rate is out of control here. Sales reps do not stick around. Within 5 months, I was the second most senior rep on my team and my manager would constantly try spinning that into being a good thing. The sales floor is a revolving door. Out of all the sellers in my unit, there's probably ~5 still left from when I joined.
